Voyager had some FPS games (Elite Force iirc) that were fairly standard Quake-Engine early naughties shooters with a Delta Quadrant Flare that were okay, but actually had a clever inventory system.

The way they explained how you could cary a phaser, a compression phase rifle, a special “infinity modulator” for fighting Borg, an an over-the-shoulder mini torpedo launcher, and more was that you had a mobile transporter buffer that held all your equipment, and the weapons would beam into and out of your hands as you changed weapons.

Those keystones are more early-2000s.

Hard to do the first without the second.

I’m a municipal government official in Texas, and I’m required to deny contracts to companies that don’t support Israel.

Like: it’s a specific contract review criteria mandated by state law.

Deisel is a resource used globally. The US doesn’t have to be purchasing Russian oil for Russian supplies to impact oil prices in the US.

It’s also why the whole argument about drilling in the US to make oil cheaper falls apart. Oil from Venezuala, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Texas, Trinidad, Abu Dhabi, or Alaska all end up in the same international commodity markets.

I’m not sure if it’s all fenced but the entire thing (including the road) is on private land, so walking around it is trespassing.

There’s only 1 road going there and it ends at the visitor’s center, and impact crater walls are higher than surrounding terrain, so unless you get past the visitor’s center all you see is a hill.

That’s actually changed. They can pay college athletes now. UT’s quarterback gets over 5 million a year because of his family name (he’s actually a mediocre quarterback according to the numbers).

Nah. That’s just you seeing a bunch of different people while thinking all Brits look alike.

The whole thing is on private land, including the road, so it just looks like a hill from anywhere you can get for free.

They stop recording for 12 minutes a day.

I went there, but they wanted to charge like 40 bucks a person to see the crater, so we left.

Home Depot near me clearanced out the Halloween stuff in September last year to make room for Christmas decorations.

I still worry about people like me who drive a LOT. I do about 35-40k miles a year. I don’t think I can trust a battery to last through the loan with the kind of mileage I put on.

I can wrench on an ICE vehicle pretty easily to keep it running for a couple hundred thousand miles. I have a used 2004 F150 that’s about to hit 600k miles on its original engine.

Yes, but it’s more than that. The idea of an armed populace is supposed to be that the threat posed by the armed citizens precents the need for insurgencies in the first place. But in the US it isn’t working because Democratic voters disarmed themselves while Republican voters armed themselves to the teeth.

An armed populace isn’t about fighting the military in some grand battle. It’s about making every random person a potential threat. When every citizen has a chance of being armed, leaders should lead in a way that doesn’t piss off too many of them.

It’s been 6 years. It’s not that weird. I got it in July of 2022, sometime in 2024, and at the very end of August this year.

This is how we’ll end up with that hyperintelligent snail, isn’t it?

It reaches out.

There’s a really bad surge in Texas right now that hit me like a truck. I’d had it a few times before, but this was by far the worst and the shortness of breath and brain fog aren’t going away this time.

My Dad was a firefighter in a city that had a referendum requiring firefighters and police receive the same salaries for the same ranks.

Council let the police hire all officers in one rank higher than the fire department to get around it.